I've been searching around online and I still haven't found a "fix" for the scaling of the CPU frequencies on linux mint using the intel_PSTATE driver. Basically what happens is that upon opening chrome or terminal or any application I want to use, instead in elegantly increasing the frequency from 800Mhz to 1.3Mhz (or something like that), it goes straight to 2.9Ghz and stays like that for the majority of the time. So far I've installed TLP and decreased the freq limit to 1.9 on battery and full speed on AC. But the issue is constant on battery even on powersaver where using an application, the computer uses all of it's speed doing an operation, which seems like it shouldn't be like that? Can someone please tell me if this is normal or not? During idle the CPU goes down to 800Mhz but it's never anywhere in between. Please, if any more information is required please let me know because I would love to figure out why because I'm liking linux mint a lot apart from this.
I am running it on a lenovo Carbon X1 gen 3 with an i5
My experience with cpu frequency govenors is, that they rather have the CPU run at a higher clock and idle more, than have it 100% loaded at low clock spead.
The clock speed allone, is hardly an indicator - right now my T450s under ubuntu gnome rocks from 994MHz to 3147MHz and that is totally fine.
I also messed around with governors as I thought it should behave like my core2 duo did.. but no, better let inter_PSTATE do what it does, they intel guys know best how to treat ther CPUs
Linux does have some issues with sensible CPU freq. Its only really a problem for low power users like laptops. A few people are working on solutions which you can keep track of over at Phonorix (few articles about it), there are also fixes you can apply yourself to some degree if I remember correctly.
So it's just a matter of time before the community find a fix so low powered laptops? thanks guys, i'll just stick with under-clocking for now cheers!